Episode Highlights

• Turning Trello into your task manager
• How to use Trello to make your perfect To-Do List
• Implementing recurring tasks into your cards
• Creating your “Getting Things Done” board
• How Zack and Natalie use Trello in their workflows
• Using task management to eliminate procrastination
• Building your notes and revisions into a Trello checklist
• Integrating Google Calendar with Trello
• How to manage your subscription notifications

Useful Links

• Trello
• FiP Q&A Submission
• Trello Blog

Transcript

Zack Arnold: Hello, and welcome to the late night edition of the Fitness and Post podcast. Today, I have with me my trusty Trello sidekick and assistant editor, Natalie Boschan. So, Natalie, hello, and Natalie does sound normal, so that’s a positive, so I appreciate that. So, we’re just gonna jump right into all of these questions for anybody that is coming to this episode, and they’re saying, I have no idea what Trello is, and I don’t know what it does, and these questions make no sense to me. I would highly recommend that you do at least one of two things first. The first would be read my getting started article that I wrote, all about how we integrate Trello into our workflow, and access that blog article that just released, you just go to fitnessandpost.com/trello so that’s T R E L L O. The second thing that you can do is you can check out the full lynda.com course if you want to start going through and understanding the basics, and that’s at Fitness and Post com slash Linda L Y N D A, and then if you really want a much deeper dive background into how Natalie and I started to implement Trello into our workflow at Empire, and it has since been improved a lot, but we did a full hour long episode about how we set up our projects, and that’s it, Fitness and post.com/ 54 So that was episode 54 of the podcast, is one of the most popular ones that we’ve done, and it was because that episode was so popular that Natalie and I decided we really need to build this into something else, and that’s why I designed and created the lynda.com course. So, what I’ve done, we probably received at least 30 questions when I posted in the Fitness and Post Facebook group, and I said, “Hey, if you have specific questions about how to use Trello in your workflow. Post them, and there were a ton of them. So, what I did was I went through, and I kind of organized them by similar themes, so I didn’t have to go through and answer 30 or 35 individual questions. So, the first place we’re going to go to, and like I said, this is going to be super rapid fire, one after another, no background, just jumping right into the deep end. So, once again, if you’re super confused, go back and read the article, look at the Linda course, or listen to our old podcast, because if you’re brand new to Trello, some of the stuff is going to be like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. The first category of questions that we got, and this is probably the most common type of question that we got, was about how to do commenting and using check boxes and checklists and to-do lists, so basically to distill it, it’s how do I turn Trello into my to-do list? So some of the questions were, do I use checklists or cards? What’s your preferred use? Should I do comments on check boxes? Should I turn them on? Should I turn them off? How do you mark stuff as done? Do you archive it or do you throw it into a quote unquote done list? How do you break down the task list? How do you organize your to-do’s? Do you have a GTD board, which stands for getting things done, or what about recurring tasks for each episode? Do you duplicate for each episode on a task list? Do you duplicate the tasks that you know are going to be replicated for each episode? Is there an easier or faster way? Like all of these are kind of broken down into the same basic question, so I’m gonna let you take it, just so I can actually give my voice a break, let you start this, and then I’ll jump in, because this is clearly one of the main reasons that you and I decided to build this Trello workflow,

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and I feel like this is an ever evolving process of how to get the best to do list out of Trello. I know that for specifically for sort of deliverables and everyday tasks, if you have one episode, one project, and you’re using one board, definitely need a to-do list. What we’ve developed is sort of I just have like a master sort of to-do list dump card, basically, so anything that needs to get done, it just gets dumped onto one card, and I sort of separate it out from there. So, I see that somebody asked about recurring tasks. So, for recurring tasks, yes, I definitely make a master card and say this is my deliverables card. So, for turnovers, I have like four checklists: I’ve got picture, sound, music, and paperwork, four different checklists on one card, and I just keep that as my template, and I duplicate it for every episode, and I keep that on each episode, and then we do that for each stage of the cut as well, for editor cut, director cut, everything, everything that comes before turnover, it’s, it’s especially important for turnover, though, because there’s so many different tasks, and this can be so customizable. What I do is, because I’m a nervous wreck when it comes to turnovers, or I was for a time, I literally write down every little thing, even though I’ve got a template for it already. I write down to check the, you know, the commercial blacks, check my slate, check this, check that, and just make sure it’s right, even though there’s a template, like just in case when I was making the template something went wrong, but I have checks to check my work, so yeah, so definitely with recurring tasks I would have a card with your recurring task checklist, so yeah, so for Matthew’s question, checklist or. Artists, I definitely love checklists.

Zack Arnold: I kind of want to take this one a little bit further, because this is something that I’ve experimented with extensively outside of just a post-production workflow. Yeah, and there are there are several different ways to do this, because if you’re just trying to build tasks, if you’re editing a single episode of TV, I feel like that’s different, as if it’s different than if you’re going to be working in a larger context on a larger project, and I’m managing multiple much larger projects, like for example, for the Move Yourself program, where it’s much bigger than just, oh, I’ve got an episode, and I know that I need to find this Musa Q and do this or that. So, there are different ways to do it, and the way that you’re talking about is really for mostly recurring tasks. So, that was one of the things we talked about in our old episode, is that if you have 15 steps every single time you output a cut, you shouldn’t be wasting any mental energy whatsoever on remembering what those tasks are, because if it’s Friday night at 11pm and you’re exhausted, you’re gonna forget three of those steps, and then all of a sudden somebody on Monday morning is gonna say, hey, you know that I didn’t have the burn in on my cut and it didn’t have time code, and why was it missing a slightly.. oh man, I was so tired, I didn’t even think about it. The checklists are beautiful for making sure you don’t forget those little things, and you don’t have to waste the mental energy, but if it comes to tasks that are, you know, things that have a lot of, a lot of checks, like the analogy that I’ve used with you is a really stupid analogy, but is that, and there’s a lot of those. Anybody that listens to the show knows that I have all that. Yeah, right. But there’s this analogy from something that I learned in middle school, where they say to you, “I want you to teach me how to cut up an apple, and the exercise is to show you how many steps are required to do something as simple as cutting up an apple, so you wouldn’t just say to somebody, well, you, you cut it down the middle, and then somebody say, well, cut it with what, you’re like, oh, you cut it with a knife, oh great, well, where do I get the knife from, oh my god, like, there’s so many steps. Okay, walk into the kitchen, that’s a step, go into the drawer, open the drawer, like you can really break down something as simple as slicing an apple into like 20 different steps, and there are certain tasks where I actually believe that it’s smart and necessary to do that. So, in that case, you would say, all right, well, the task is I need to cut up an apple, that’s a card, but then all of the individual steps to accomplish that one task, those become checklists, so that’s how you can break down something like somebody had mentioned a GTD board, a getting things done board. You can have your lists that are based on categories of things that you need to do. You can have a card for a task, but if that’s a complex task that has multiple steps, don’t make 20 cards, go in and make one card for the entire task until completion, and then have all of the individual steps required to complete that task inside it as checklist.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and I think this is very individual. I think this is something you have to sort of go through a lot of trial and error with this GTD board, just because I’m still going through a lot. I mean, how long we’ve been using Trello for, like two years now, maybe. Is it two years, something like

Zack Arnold: That? It’s been a little over two years. Yeah,

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. And I still don’t think that I’ve, like, really cracked this code for me personally. What I started doing is a to-do list per episode, and then I use whatever episode I’m working on as my sort of main to-do list, but that’s also not a great system for it, I have my to-do list for my, because I use Trello for my own personal life too. I have a whole Trello board that’s got all of my important life stuff on there, and one of the cards is my to-do list, and the to-do list is broken up into tasks for today, tasks for this week, tasks for the weekend, things that I should think about doing soon, and I have, like, long-term tasks that I know, you know, the organize the garage, and those types of tasks. So that’s what I do for my own personal life, and that works really well. But I honestly don’t think I’ve cracked the code on having the major in Trello. I mean, my way of doing a to-do list is on a Post-it still, because it’s right in front of my face all of the time, and I can see it all the time, and I can write on it really quickly, but for the to-do list, in a professional sense, when you have multiple episodes or multiple projects, that is not a code I’ve cracked yet, and I’m still working on that.

Zack Arnold: It’s kind of an addition to that for me, and yes, it is very personal, and I know that you always laugh because your to-do list system is still post-its, but

Natalie Boschan: I love my post-its. I can’t get over

Zack Arnold: It. I don’t.. the technology doesn’t matter. The system is what matters, and your system is that as soon as you have something to do, you take it out of your brain and you put it onto a list. That’s the getting things done system.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, what I did correct, though, was having to be so.. a lot of times I’ll be sitting in, you know, spotting session or some sort of session of some sorts with other people, with you and a couple of producers, and then our post-producer turned to us and say, “Hey, we need to do x, y, and z. Can you make sure this person gets this? Can you make sure that person gets this other thing? So, in that sense, what’s really helpful is I have my iPad in front of me, and I have a to-do list open, and I just write things down, and I say, “To-do. List from spotting session, and then I have, like, six things listed, and my producer sort of rattled off and said, you need to do this, and you do this, and you do this, and I go, okay, got that. That seems to be working really well when it comes to spotting sessions, but where it gets messy is when you’ve got three episodes at once, and you’ve got all the tasks being fired at you. It’s really hard to go into different to-do lists for different episodes and write stuff down. It’s so much easier to do the post-it note right in front of your face, for me personally. So, the getting things done board, I think, is just something you’ve got to do, trial and error, and just see what really works best for you, and what’s working. What helps you get things done? And can you continue to repeat that over and over? The exact side, can you keep up with the system? Because if it’s the system doesn’t work, then there’s no point. If the Trello system doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work for you. You do something else. This, I think, is a hard nut to crack. Yes, it

Zack Arnold: Is. And it’s going to be personal for everybody, and for anybody that doesn’t know anything about the GTD system, or when we’re saying getting things done, it’s an actual system that was created by somebody named David Allen, who’s actually going to be an upcoming guest on the podcast, so you’re going to get an entire hour coming to you, probably in the next month or two. I don’t have an exact date yet, but I will be releasing an entire show with David Allen, the mastermind behind the GTD system. So, we’ll go deeper into that, but again, I think that the important thing to think about is how does this fit into your own mindset and the way that you do things, then how can you use Trello to improve that? Don’t try and fit a square peg into a round hole, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But one additional thing that I want to add on that I think is super helpful is understanding how to create these notes, cards, and checklists in the idea of contexts, and this is something that I talk about on my recent blog post, where I talk about contextual editing, and if you haven’t caught that, it’s just fitness in post.com/context c o n t e x t s. And an example of that would be I usually don’t have my own to do list after I deliver an editor’s cut. All I do all day long is other people’s to-do lists. After I deliver an editor’s cut, my entire job is doing people’s notes, so I have all, and that’s something we’re going to get into later, is how to organize client notes and revisions, because that’s a huge, huge question that we’ve gotten as well. So, we’ll get into that in a minute, but all of those are going to be organized into checklists. But during my editor’s cut, it is kind of me designing my own to-do list, so I don’t have tons and tons of cards. I have one single card that I call Editor’s Cut, and inside that Editor’s Cut card, I have multiple checklists that are broken down by context. So, I have one checklist that says Music, I have one checklist that says Score, I have one that says Sound Effects, I have one that says glitches, or whatever it is. So, that way, when I’m thinking to myself, all right, for the next few hours, all I’m going to do is focus on everything I need to do from Music. I have my contextually organized to-do list in my checklist, in my one card that’s called Editor’s Cut. And if you want to break that down into separate cards, and that’s better for you, that’s fine. Then make a card that’s called Music Fixes, make a card that’s called Score that I need, make one that’s called Sound effects, whatever it is, and then inside that, do a single checklist. I just like to have the fewest number of cards possible, because the more cards you get, the harder they are to see, and I really like to have everything in front of me at once. Like, this is Natalie knows this is one of my biggest pet peeves, is that when bin is organized with dailies, I never want to scroll. I don’t want to have to look for things in the window. Everything has to fit inside one window, and if there’s too many dailies and too many clips, I want a second window, so I can go between tabs, because I never want to think, oh man, maybe there’s something else in here that I can’t find and scroll and look for, because then somebody would say, hey, where’s that one insert? I didn’t know you had an insert, oh crap, it was outside the window, and I didn’t see it, so it’s not, it’s not just an OCD thing, it is an OCD thing, but it’s, I will admit that, but at the same time, it’s, it’s allowing me to minimize mistakes and make sure everything is there, and I take the same approach with Trello cards, where the more Trello cards there are, the more apt you are to miss some, because they’re buried deep inside lists that you can’t see on your monitor, so my strategy is the least number of cards possible, and when things get complicated, I try to build it out into checklists within those cards, as long as contextually it makes sense.

Natalie Boschan: What’s great about just doing checklists instead of cards is that you get to check the box, you see the strike through, and the bay like grays out, and it’s very satisfying.

Zack Arnold: Yeah,

Natalie Boschan: As opposed to a card where you just archive in and just don’t see it. When you look at your list and you see all of these strike-throughs, you’re like, “Oh, look at all the things that I did.

Zack Arnold: Right, it’s very psychological, and it’s a very good way to motivate yourself to do more and avoid procrastination. And that’s actually something that I talk about in the Linda course, is the idea of motivating yourself to do more and not get overwhelmed by the amount of material that you have, and breaking it down in these checklists. It’s a psychological effect called the Zeigarnik effect, and I talk about it in the blog post and the full Trello course. I go more in depth, but before we move forwards, I actually. We wanted to dig deeper into one of these that you kind of just touched upon, and that’s the idea of how do you mark stuff as done? Do you archive it or throw it into a done list or to-do list? And there’s a few different ways to do this. You’ve already mentioned the first one, which is that when checklists are done, you check it and it turns green and you get a strike through line. You’re like, yeah, I just did something, I feel great, but but the next step is you don’t want to have tons and tons of clutter on your Trello boards with all the stuff that isn’t necessary anymore. So, there’s a couple of ways to do it. The first one is to use colors to track your progress, which is something I go to extensively in the Linda course. Every single color, how I label it, how we use it, like I go really in depth into the use of colors for both tracking your progress and tracking your story and your themes, but so, for example, I don’t really do this so much in our post-production workflow, but I do this extensively in my workflow for when I’m doing multiple videos, so when I did the 120 plus videos for the Move Yourself program, I was using colors so I can filter and track everything, so for example, to me green means something is done, that’s a color that you and I use as well. Green means is completed,

Natalie Boschan: Green means go,

Zack Arnold: Exactly, green means go. So I know that if something’s green, it’s complete, but I still have it there in case I need it. Once I know that it’s absolutely unnecessary, it’s totally white noise at this point that I don’t need any more, then Trello has the archival feature, so I will archive it, so that means that it completely disappears from your board. But the great thing about Trello is that is it is 100% non-destructive, so you can always just click a single button. You can say see archived items, it’ll show every single card, list, or board that has been archived. You click a single button, and everything is restored exactly the way that it was before archival, so you really can’t delete anything completely. It’s all there, so archiving is not losing something, it’s just a way of cleaning it up.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, exactly. And I was gonna say, like, so it sort of combines the recurring task question with the archiving it, or throw it in a done list. Yeah, so basically, like, if you have recurring tasks, and you have a card that is, that is your template for your recurring tasks. It’s much easier to keep one card of recurring tasks and have multiple checklists on the one card than it is to keep a whole list. You know, they have to continually duplicate onto different boards. It’s a lot cleaner, I think, to just do that. So, I feel like, and then, well, you don’t have to, arc, and it’s, I mean, if you want to keep it on your board, and you don’t want to archive it, or you want to throw it in a done list, if you prefer that, because I mean, some people might find that satisfying, you know, some people might find it satisfying to not have anything on the board, just sort of, the goal is to get the cards off the board, but it also might be satisfying to have the done list be, you know, filled up, so it just depends on what sort of mental tricks you want to play with yourself. So, yeah, so I think that if you want to do a done list or an archive, it’s so much easier to do one card than it is to do a full list. Does that

Natalie Boschan: Make sense?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. If, like, for example, if you’re talking about the output of a specific cut and there’s 15 steps. Do not make 15 cards for each one of those if it’s recurring, because then you have to duplicate 15 cards every single cut, as opposed to duplicating one card and having the checklist already there and already complete. So, yeah, in that case, that’s a great point. You should not, you should not do recurring tasks on multiple cards, they should only be on one card. So, that’s that. Is a very, very good point, and we’ll have to create a new term called Trello Zero, kind of like Inbox Zero. I like that idea of getting an empty board. I’ve never thought about that before.

Zack Arnold: I’ve achieved the Trello Zero.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I know we keep all of our stuff on there when we finish tasks and stuff, so or like cuts, when cuts go out and come back, we always keep the checklist on there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, it’s not, but we don’t treat our Trello board as a to-do list. We treat it as an organizational system. So, it’s to me, it’s just the digital version of having a giant whiteboard with a bunch of cards and paperwork and calendars, and I’m just trying to replace four binders worth of paperwork plus two giant whiteboards, so I have it all in Trello. So, in that sense it doesn’t make any sense to get to an empty board, because it’s not a task list as an organizational system, but I do like the idea of possibly you could create a task board and that could be where like recurring tasks go, so there’s the point is our workflow is not the way to do this, this is our way to do this, and anybody could create a totally different workflow, because Trello is so versatile, but I’ve just, when I started talking about using Trello, everybody said the same thing, like I looked at it, I know how to use it, I can make lists and cars, but I have no idea what to do from here, so that was the inspiration for creating the course, is giving a roadmap, because once you have that, then you can say, “Oh, this is awesome, but there’s like five things here that I would do totally differently. Do it, do it differently, that’s fine. Our this is not the way to do it, it’s just our way. So,

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, just takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works best for your brain. Yes, we went through a lot of different iterations of our workflow, and it’s still evolving.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it evolves every single day, and. I look back at what we talked about in episode 54 and like, oh man, we had no idea we were talking about, and then in a year I may revisit this and say, oh my god, I’ve learned so much about trouble, I can’t believe we told them to do that thing, that was so dumb. So, yes, it evolves all the time, but for now, this is where we are. So now I want to move on to the next section, which is another really common question that I get, and for me was probably one of the biggest game changers and aha moments about how powerful using Trello is in your post workflow, and that is how to organize client notes and revisions, and this was a struggle for me for four years when I started on burn notice, and I just started incessantly getting sent notes over and over and over by so many different people. You get so lost in the amount of notes. Some people walk into your room and they hand you a printed out email. Some people will send you Excel spreadsheets with fields from a continuity that was, that’s like the worst system ever. Like, I’m gonna take the Excel spreadsheet for the continuity and put my notes in there. It’s like, really, it was the worst system that was actually not something that we did on burn notice, that was something we did on Black Box. But that system drove me crazy. But you, and I’m sure that everybody feels that way, you just get overwhelmed by the amount of information given to you, and you say, I just want all of this in one place. So, there’s really two main benefits of building your notes and revisions into checklists on Trello, and the first of which is that you’re going to be able to find everything really, really quickly. So, for example, with the notes and revisions workflow that I built, if somebody came in to me right now, and I swear to God, if somebody from Empire, and I haven’t been on Empire for months, somebody came in and said, listen, there was a change made in episode 106 where you changed this shot to that shot. I could tell them the day that I made that change, I could tell them the person that gave me that note, and I could tell them in what context. So I could say, well, that note was given to me by this director, and they gave it to me on this day, and they set it in the room on the couch, or this was given to me by a producer, and they gave me this note on a Friday via email. I can put all that in a checklist, and I can keep all of it in one single place. And I got to the point where anytime somebody would send me a certain type of note, I would say, ‘All right, how can I track this kind of note? All right, then I would figure out a way, and I would put it in the checklist, so now everything is in one specific place, organized by which cut I was working on, organized by person, time, and context. So it’s a really, really powerful system, and it’s all just done with checklists,

Natalie Boschan: And you can attach the notes to cards, you can email them to cars, or you can copy them into a checklist, which is one of the most satisfying things, is to just watch everything go checklist, and you did none of it. It just shows up in a checklist, like, yes,

Zack Arnold: Yeah. And that I actually found that by mistake, where I remembered I’d gotten probably at least 20 pages worth of single space time coded notes, and anybody that that’s worked with me or worked on Empire probably knows where those notes came from, but I got over 20 pages worth of single space notes with time code, and I just was like, all right, this is ridiculous. I’m just going to copy all these into a card, and then I’m going to figure out how to organize them, and I accidentally copied them into a checklist, and I hit the return button, and they magically populated into their own check boxes, and I almost fainted. I said, oh my god, this is a game changer. And that was the moment that I realized that I could do every single thing in Trello. That was when I said, all right, this is my new workflow, and it’s time for me to figure this out and dig in and get every single piece of the workflow working in Trello. That was the moment that was the game changer for me, was when I got that made that work.

Natalie Boschan: It’s very cool program.

Zack Arnold: So, because there was another part to this question, one person had said, “Well, can you export visual effects lists for visual effects department, ADR lists, and whatnot? That’s not the kind of thing that Trello does. Those are still things that you’re going to need to track and organize in your NLE, whether it’s Avid, Premiere, Final Cut. 10 doesn’t matter what it is, you can have separate lists to help you keep all of those exports organized and give access to specific team members, but it’s not like Trello is going to link up with your NLE. That’s actually a miscellaneous question that somebody had later on that I might as well address now. Somebody said, well, I don’t get it. How does Trello link to your media? That’s not how Trello works. Trello is not a program that you install on your computer, that’s going to offer some type of link with your actual media or with your NLE. Trello is basically just going to be your organizational system for all of your information. So, if you’re thinking, how do I integrate it with my editing platforms, it doesn’t work that way.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, instead of your piles of paper, basically that pile of paper you have on your desk can be put onto the internet,

Zack Arnold: Right. Well, and that’s the other thing that I failed to mention about the checklist with the notes, because I had said there are two main reasons that it’s so important. The first of which is I can find everything very, very quickly, which makes producers and directors very, very happy, because you’re faster and more organized. But the second thing that’s so important is that you don’t miss things. Because there’s nothing more frustrating than being under a deadline and you’re scanning a cut and you’re watching it with a producer or director and they’re like wait we can’t output this yet, where’s that one thing I totally asked you to switch that shot, you’re like oh my god you did, I’m so sorry you asked me to do that, I completely forgot about it, those moments are gone, like once you have these checklist systems, I don’t miss notes because they’re all in one place. That’s not like, oh, you know what, that was on that one piece of paper and I’d set that down next to the printer. When I grabbed the other notes, I just missed those four notes. Like, people don’t excuse that kind of stuff anymore. They expect everything to be done and be done quickly. And with Trello checklist, you never miss anything.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, but if you really want a list that you can export for VFX or ADR list or Musical List, I mean at least an Avid, and I’m pretty sure you can do this in Premiere, but I haven’t worked on Premiere for a TV show yet. I just use markers, and then I write in my descriptions what the, you know, like for ADR, like I write the line in the description, and so then you just export that, and then copy that into a document, and there you go. You don’t have to type in time code manually, or anything like that. It’s not like the most beautiful system, but I think it works really well when you’re not – you don’t want to sit there and type in time code. I do that for VFX list too, when I have to type in the VFX. I mean, it mostly works, so you don’t have to sit there typing in time code, you just copy, you export your markers list, it’s got your endpoint, that is, if you put your marker on the endpoint, you have to put your marker on the head of the cut, and then you export that into an Excel sheet, and that works pretty well for now.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so I don’t want people to think that Trello does everything, it really doesn’t. Trello is just a great way to get yourself more organized, and like, have to spend less mental energy tracking things. So, I just.. I want to make sure people understand that Trello is not just about connecting to everything, and it’s going to edit for you. Maybe in five years it will. And if you want more information about that, refer to my previous podcast about artificial intelligence. So, we’ll see what Trello does for us five years from now, but for now it’s about getting organized.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it’s a task management program that we’ve appropriated for post production.

Zack Arnold: Exactly, it’s not made for post production, it’s not a post production app. There are so many different industries that use people that are in the technology industry, software industry. I know teachers are starting to figure out how to use Trello, like anybody can use it. Anybody can go to Office Max, and they can buy a whiteboard, and they can buy a bunch of index cards and markers, like that’s all that this is. We’re just showing you the system specifically for post. Alright, so speaking of keeping things organized, I want to go to the next series of questions, and that is about how to use calendars, because this was another one of my huge revelatory moments, when I said, ‘Oh my god, not only can I organize these tasks, I can create entire calendars. And I remember the moment that you and I were working on the Netflix show for a short period of time, and we had a one liner, we had a one liner that covered the entire season, because it was eight episodes cross boarded simultaneously, so they were shooting eight episodes at once, and we said, How in the world are we ever going to keep track of our schedule? and you cracked this code, so I’m gonna let you take this, and then we’ll talk more about some of the specific calendar functions that Trello has.

Natalie Boschan: What I did was I created a structure map for each episode, and on each episode I put the shoot date on it as a due date, so we had every scene a description of every scene, one through 51, through 90, in some cases, description of the scene is on the card, and then what’s also on the card is a due date, and so you would, so you mark that due date right on the card, your due date, and then what Trello does is you can then import that into a Google calendar or an iCal, and so, so I did that for all episodes, and I then took the link for each episode, for each structure map, I took the link that Trello creates for you, the URL, copied that into my Google calendar, and I had one calendar per episode, and since we were on three, three of the episodes at the time, or two of the episodes at the time, ultimately three, but whoever’s two at the time, you could turn on and off each episode, so if you wanted to see what was getting shot on every, you know, every day you could turn on all the calendars for all the episodes, or you could only turn on specific calendars. So we were on episodes two and seven, and so we turned on two, we turned on seven, and then we could see in a calendar, in a Google calendar, what was getting shot that day, what dailies were coming in, because when you cross episodes of a season, and you just have a one liner. It’s very hard to visualize when am I getting dailies, what’s coming next. I don’t understand. It’s just very hard to just get call sheets and look and say, okay, I guess we’re doing this tomorrow, and then we’re doing this, but if you have a calendar that literally just lists, you know, you have three scenes this day, you have four scenes this day, that it’s so. Much easier to look and plan your week, and say, okay, well, we’re only getting four scenes for this entire week. You just turn those two episodes on, you say, oh, look, we’re getting four scenes this week, and so it’s really easy to visualize, and it works really well for the post staff, because they can see what’s going on on each episode, because you color, you can color code each calendar, so they have a good sort of bird’s eye view of what’s being shot, and then you just change it as the one liner changes, because that’s what happens, so you go in and change it manually when you have to. It does update in your Google calendar, it doesn’t do it live, but it takes about, it takes about 24 hours to actually update the whole Google calendar or iCal,

Zack Arnold: And that’s actually not true anymore. It now updates live, they’ve fixed that, so it now updates

Natalie Boschan: Instantly.

Zack Arnold: It’s awesome. Yeah,

Natalie Boschan: Yes. And now what’s even better, because we were doing a lot of partial scenes for this shoot, I couldn’t put multiple due dates on a card to show that a scene was partial, so I marked it part and I put the due date that I put on was the last due date, when the scene was going to be complete, but it did not have on there when the first part was coming in, because I couldn’t do more than one due date. But now on Trello, you can do more than one due date on a card, so that problem has been solved as well. So, for partial scenes, you just put two due dates on a card.

Zack Arnold: This was a huge, huge game-changing feature, because it drove both of us nuts that we couldn’t have multiple due dates. You can now create custom fields as one of the power ups, and if you’re listening to all this and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t get it, I’ve used Trello, and I don’t know where the calendar section is, and none of it makes any sense. It’s not super intuitive. I go through every single one of these steps in the course for how to create a calendar, how to link it with Google, how to link it with Apple, whatever your system is, as well as how to create the multiple due dates, but the one caveat about multiple due dates is that it still only shows your primary due date on your calendar. I know, and I’m really, really, really hoping that they fix that, but the problem is that if you have one card, I don’t think that they have a way to have that card duplicate itself for multiple due dates, so I kind of get it. So, if it’s super, super important, and you have to have it visually represented on more than one date, you need more than one card, which is the way that I did it for the podcast and the blog for a long time, where, when I wanted to see my release calendar, those were different cards from the work in progress cards, but now what I’ll do on an episode of a podcast is I just have three or four due dates listed that are based on team members, so if you’re the editor of the podcast, there’s your due date. If you’re the person that’s writing the show notes and publishing the show notes, here’s your due date, and then here’s my due date for actually hitting the publish button and sending it out into the world, and then here’s the social media due date, but not all of those are going to show up on a visual calendar, but they are at least there for your team members, but it’s they still need to do a little bit of work to kind of finesse this, but it’s come light years ahead of where it was when they first started.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. Oh, it’d be so cool if they could figure that out, and then you can do your post calendars through Trello, and just have all of your calendar and have, like, your staff main board with that. When

Zack Arnold: You still can do that, it just, the multiple due dates will throw you off on partial scenes. But, yeah, I mean, the other option,

Natalie Boschan: Like, when cuts are doing stuff, like editor, cut director, cut, you know, instead of just doing the iCal and sending that out to put it in Trello, if the multiple due dates could span, you know what I mean, they had spans of time and stuff like that, that would be so cool.

Zack Arnold: Yes, yeah, that would be nice. If you could actually do spans, and you could say it goes from Monday through Friday, and have the colored bar the way that you do in Google or iCal, or actually, I think it’s called calendar now. I don’t know, I’m old school, but yeah, that, that, that would be the one thing that’s left is it’s still the cards represent individual days, but you can’t do it by time spans, and you can’t do it by day spans, but I have a feeling that the time will come when they kind of figure that out. So, so now that we’ve kind of talked about how calendars work, the next section of questions that I’ve gotten, which is fairly common, and this is something that I had a hard time figuring out for a long time is how to manage notifications, so I want to read these questions specifically. One of them is from Mike J. Nichols, and if you don’t know, Mike and I did a podcast together talking about why we, as editors, are not below the line. So, if you want to listen to that, you can go into the show notes and get the link for that. But he wants to know, how do you make sure that you get notified when someone comments and how to get other people notified, and how to shut it off. And then the second part of this question comes from Josh, and it says, How are notifications from Trello any less problematic as an interruption than emails? And I, that might be my favorite question of all of them, because that really digs into the meat of why all of this is built, so the first question is about notifications, and I will say completely frankly, Trello has not figured out notifications, they’re not great. I think it’s the weakest link of Trello is how notifications work. I’ve actually talked to people at Trello about this, and they agree it’s the bane of their existence, basically. Travel has one giant repository of notifications. There’s no way to organize them. You can’t turn into an inbox. You can’t turn certain notifications on or certain notifications off, so it can be a problem.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, this was driving me nuts when we were doing our for the podcast, because I literally get notifications on everything, and then I miss stuff because I get too much, because I just got notifications on everything when I turned them on. I was like, but yeah, when you get too many, when the way that Trello isn’t set up, you only, you just get all of the notifications for all of the board, and maybe you don’t need some of those notifications, maybe you’re not in, you know, your part of the project is coming a little later. You don’t need to know what happens beforehand, and so you’re getting all these emails and notifications, and it’s a mess. But now, what can you do, Zack?

Zack Arnold: Well, I was gonna say that there are solutions to just about all of this. Ideally, what I want is a Trello inbox. I want to be able to treat my inbox the way that I can treat my email inbox, and I don’t want them to give me an email program. I’m not asking for that. I just want a way to organize my Trello notifications more efficiently, and also be able to turn them on and off. However, if you really want to spend a little bit of time and get this right, it is very possible, because Trello gives you the option to subscribe. So, and this is something I go into extensively into in the course, the lynda.com course is how to manage and organize your notifications, with the caveat that it’s not perfect, and I’m not saying that it’s great, but this is the system that I’ve developed to be able to manage it, and that’s using subscriptions. So, what you can do in Trello is you can subscribe at every single level, so part of the reason that you got notifications for everything is because you were subscribed to the entire team, you were an admin at the team level, so that meant that anything on the fitness of post team you were a part of, because you were listed as an admin. What you can do if you’re not an admin of a team is you can subscribe to an individual card, an individual list, or an individual board. So, for example, let’s say that your producer says we want to do Trello for the whole season of our show, and there’s going to be 18 boards because you have 18 episodes, but you, as an assistant editor, you’re only on six of those 18 because you have a three editor rotation. What you would do is you would just subscribe to the boards that you’re a part of, and you would not receive notifications about the others to drill down even further. Let’s say that you have a board that manages all of your deliverables, so if you have your sound team on it, you have your audio editor, you have your colorist, you have your visual effects team, whatever it is, they can subscribe just to individual lists, so if they say, well, here’s a list that has all the visual effects information, the specs, whatever it is, it relates to visual effects. People on the visual effects team subscribe to that list, and they only get notifications about those, but they’re not going to get notifications or activity about all the other cards or lists on the same board. And then to drill down even further, you can subscribe to just cards, so if you have a card that talks about the delivery specs for picture, your editor can be on there, you can have your colorist on there, you can have your online editor on there, and be subscribed, but they’re not going to get notifications about anything else, so you can get this organized, it’s just not super simple.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, well, I mean, and also not treating Trello as a chat room, basically, is what you described it as. When we decided to integrate Slack,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that is a huge point.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, so if you start doing all your conversations as Slacks and integrating Slack into your workflow as well, and use that as your place for talking back and forth, then you won’t be constantly, even if you’re subscribed to the card, you won’t get this barrage of emails and notifications with, you know, this person commented, then this person commented, then this person commented, because they’re having a conversation on the card. You to have your conversations and, you know, working things out in Slack.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I

Natalie Boschan: Guess you could do Google Hangouts if you wanted, but I really like Slack.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so that’s actually I’m going to combine that with one of our later questions, because that was a question from Adrian, where he said you use Slack integration, and this was another kind of game changer, where we moved forward with our workflow, is that for a while we were using Trello as instant messenger, and that is the biggest mistake that you can make that’s going to cause it to be an incessant amount of interruptions and notifications that are just going to be as bad as hearing the ding on your email, so the idea is in the rule that I set up, and I actually create a card now when I build my teams, and I say these are the communication guidelines, I attach the team to it, and I say, here’s where you do your specific types of communications. The first rule is no email, like zero emails, when I’m working with a team, email is not even allowed. The two main rules would be number one, if it’s something that’s specifically task-related. So, for example, with the Move Yourself program, there were over 100 short exercise videos that people can use to alleviate chronic pain or increase mobility, whatever it is, and on one of those videos it. Have been like lower back pain, left side, so if there was a glitch, if there was a problem, or if there was a note, like, okay, I watched version one, here are my five notes that goes on the card, because it’s card specific. If somebody’s saying, hey, I’m having trouble outputting this specific video, I’m having a glitch, that should be on the card. And what you want to think about, and this is something that I’ve talked about on my USC classes, and I probably talked about it somewhere in the podcast. In the past, is the hit by a bus theory. You get hit by a bus, and somebody takes over for you. If they read your boards, are they going to know the history of everything? So this is great for bringing on new team members, because if a new team member comes in, you can say just read the board, and you’re going to know everything that’s going on about the things that pertain to you, so are the conversations happening on that card going to help somebody else coming in, and if not, and it’s just you chatting, that’s what Slack is for. In Slack, you can break that down into channels and specific conversations as well, so it’s not one giant IM, it’s not like just being on Google Hangouts or on messages, it’s still team specific, so if you have something you need to let everybody on your picture team know, you can make a channel called Picture. If you want to let just your sound team know something, or have a general conversation, you can make a sound channel. So the idea is you can still organize your conversations, but if it’s just instant messaging, if it’s general questions about schedule, it’s like, hey guys, guess what, we just got a huge delivery of score from our composer. I’m inputting it now. Don’t put that stuff on Trello. Trello is only task specific. That will drastically reduce the amount of notifications that you get, but at the end of the day, you still need to be diligent about making sure you’re subscribed only to the things that you need to be a part of. But the great thing about Trello also is that it functions like Twitter, where if somebody notifies you specifically on a card that you know nothing about, you don’t even know the card existed, but if they do an at notification, you’re going to get that. So it’s not like people are going to be asking you questions and you’re going to miss them. You just need to make sure your team understands the general guideline of, hey, don’t notify everybody if they don’t need to know. Keep your conversations on cards that you’re subscribed to, and that you’re a member of, and then anything outside of those conversations just happens in Slack. So, now that we’ve talked about notifications, the next area that we’re gonna go, and I kind of feel like we’ve talked about this a little bit, but we can dive a little bit deeper, and we’re kind of running out of time here, but it’s the idea of setting up a workflow for multiple episodes, and, like, for example, the question is, How do you set up for a 10 episode series that would have common elements and deliveries, but maybe different people working on it, or what if you’re working on two different versions of a project. So we’ve talked a little bit about the idea of having multiple main boards for an episode, having multiple structure maps for an episode, but we can go a little bit deeper into this, because this was something that you and I really debated for a long time,

Natalie Boschan: So yeah, I mean, we, we implemented this a little bit, sort of team-wide with our last show, so each episode has its own board, so every team will be on their own board, talking about their own stuff, but what’s what we also had for the assistant editors and the post staff was a deliverables board, and on that board we posted a lot of the spec sheets, and then who got what and how they got us. We had a lot of different delivery systems when you’re dealing with multiple vendors, so we had a bunch of different delivery systems, so it was who got what and how they received the materials, so that seemed to work pretty well. Each episode having its own episode board with all of the sort of general tasks, and then having a main sort of cuts and deliverables board, so that once you’re done with said tasks for that episode, you can look at your cuts and deliverables board, and see where all of that goes now. So, that’s so that was pretty good, having just one place for all the information, and this is where you sort of put all of your checklist templates too. What’s funny is sometimes some of the some people would have, I had a checklist template for the turnover, and I said, well, this is what I use for turnover, guys. If you want to use this as well, feel free. And so, a lot of people would print out the checklist and use it as a checklist to write on, which you can also do. It’s very valid if you need to, because, like, writing and actually doing the check by hand is actually very satisfying. But I just found that I found that funny. So, yeah, that’s that’s how we did it, and that’s what’s been working so far

Zack Arnold: Well, and the funny thing about that board, kind of to tie this in with notifications, I didn’t even know that board existed. Oh

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: So I didn’t get notifications, it didn’t clutter up my life. You guys had this whole world on Trello, I knew nothing about, like I had no clue that there was an actual board for the producers and the assistants, like you guys just have your own little world. So that’s one of the things I love about Trello, is you create these little ecosystems where you can gather everything and organize it, but you’re not getting everybody involved with it, so that’s that’s actually really, really, really cool.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, because the editors don’t need to know, so each episode board is between the editors and the assistant editors, stuff that we need to know between each other, you know what needs to be. An insert, what needs to be a visual effect, what needs this, that like things that we need to communicate and remember for the episode, but then there’s stuff that the editor doesn’t need to know, and the assistants need to communicate with the staff, which is a lot of the sort of, you know, technical admin type of stuff to get the episode to where it needs to go, so having those sort of like two separate worlds of Trello really helped. I just liked having all the deliverables in one spot, because we’re, you know, you get to VFX and it’s the third episode, and you think, wait, how – who do I send this to again? And you go to your board, like, oh, right, right, right, this goes to this person. So, yeah, it’s really good place to have everything, and it just doesn’t clog up people’s inboxes. You don’t have to run into the other room, like, who gets this sheet again, or where do we send this again, and who gets copied on this email, because there’s like, you know, there’s a million different people when it comes to different vendors, and everyone needs to be copied, or this person doesn’t want to be copied, or whatnot. So it’s very helpful to have that all in one list without going to someone who do I need to put on this, what else

Zack Arnold: Do I need to do, because that’s that’s something that I call busy work. Let’s eliminate the busy work. That’s the whole point of this, is getting rid of the busy work, getting rid of the interruptions, and just kind of getting back to being creative. So, just then, to kind of quickly wrap up this idea about the boards and how you would organize them, my suggestion would be that if your entire team is involved, have that one main team board for producers and for assistants and everybody else, then for each episode you have two boards, one of which is your main board, and then one of which is your structure map. I don’t really want to go into extensively, but it’s basically the Trello version of having index cards on board that have all of your scenes. This is something that you’re actually going to be able to pick up much quicker on how to do if you go to the blog post at fitnessinpost.com/trello it’s going to have visual representations of boards as well as actual boards with index cards, so you can kind of see how they translate. But then there’s one very last kind of addendum question in this section that’s super, super quick to answer, which is, if I have two different versions of a project, how do I organize it? You can just duplicate your boards. So that was another kind of game changer, is realizing, oh, if I have a structure map and all of a sudden I have to rewrite everything, I don’t want to lose this version. You just hit the duplicate button and you have new boards. So it’s really, really simple, is that you just create duplicates, you name them differently, just like you would duplicate cuts, and you just keep your board names that make sure that they match your cut names, and now you have your visual board that matches up with that, so I won’t go any deeper into that. That’s pretty self-explanatory. Now, I want to just, because we’re running out of time, we’ve kind of run a little bit over, and because my voice is failing me, I want to rapid fire go through the last couple of questions. The first one is, and this is a really common question that I address in the course, which is, Does the free version of Trello, do the trick, or do you recommend business class, and it depends on how deeply you’re going to use it, and how much you want to integrate with the kind of power ups that you want to have. That one of the new features of Trello is that in the free version, you only get one power up, so for example, being able to enable calendars, that’s called a power up, being able to enable custom fields and have multiple due dates, that’s power up. So, if you need multiple power ups, you’re not going to be able to do it with the free version. But I got along with just the free version for a long time before I really started to dig in and say, I want to teach this now, I need to learn a lot of these other power ups. However, you don’t need to go to business class either, and I’m not even on business class. I experimented with it for a month, and I said I don’t really need this functionality, because the team is small enough, I can get away with everything without business class. But there’s a version in the middle, and that version is called Trello Gold, and Trello Gold is where you’re going to get access to a whole bunch of power ups, you’re going to be able to do custom backgrounds to your boards, you can add cat stickers to your cards, and that’s not an exaggeration. You can actually add a cat sticker to your cards, that’s one of the power-ups. It’s kind of ridiculous, but Trello Gold is like $5 a month, and I can’t imagine anything that I’ve ever gotten more money out of in my life than $5 a month for Trello.

Natalie Boschan: It’s great.

Zack Arnold: So, my recommendation is just get Trello gold, and the other cool thing is that if you have a team for every single person that you get to sign up for Trello Gold, you get a free month, not even Trello Gold. If you get them to just sign up for Trello and start an account, you get a free month, and that lasts for up to a year. So my first year of Trello, I got 100% for free because I was inviting so many people that I probably would have gotten like three years for free, but I got my first year for free, and now I pay $5 a month to do everything that we’ve talked about, plus 100 things more. So, my recommendation is, start free, and then if you say, “You know what, I really kind of want to get into this, pay five bucks a month. You’re not going to spend better money than five bucks a month on Trello.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, it’s great, and you get the.. I did it specifically for the calendar when I got Trello Gold. I was like, I need this calendar, let me put this. That’s why I did it.

Zack Arnold: Totally worth it. So, another quick question, somebody said, you use any sort of automation besides emailing to Trello using programs like Zapier? I talk about Zapier somewhat in. The move yourself course on how to use it to automate specific behaviors. It’s not something that I talk about in the lynda.com course. I do use it. I don’t use it extensively, but there are so many cool automations that you can set up if you want to go down that rabbit hole. Just one really simple one that I’ll mention, and then I won’t go further, because there’s documentation you can read for hours about the cool automations that you can create, but for example, I can create an automation using Zapier, where if somebody adds a color label to a card, I can receive a notification versus text message. So, let’s say that I’m in the process of trying to deliver final videos for something, and I tell somebody every time that you’re ready for me to look at it, market orange, which means awaiting review. So, all they have to do is market orange, and then I’ll get a text message that says this card is awaiting review. That’s not something you can do in Trello, but it’s something you can automate using outside programs like Zapier. I don’t have extensive automations, but you can really go nuts and automate everything if you want to, and a lot of that’s going to be free as well. You can get an upgrade to Zapier, which is like $20 a month, which I have for a lot of the automations that I have for the Move Yourself program, but for Trello I don’t really need them. And then the last quick question that I kind of want to go through before we go is, somebody had asked, are there any security concerns, especially with regards to working on projects which may be under an NDA, and the first thing that I’ll say is that in the vast majority of cases, this is no different than emailing people scripts, like emails digital and online too, and they’re going to be security concerns about using Gmail, or I mean, so if you’re allowed to have the internet at all, there are no security concerns, because this is encrypted and just as secure as it would be if you were emailing Google Docs back and forth or using Google Drive to store your scripts in your documents. However, for the people that are at the elite level of security, this is a little bit different, and I’m gonna let you take that question.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I’m on a show that has like super, super security, and I was at sadly, Zack and I am not on the same show, because Zach’s doing his core stuff, so I’m off on my own now, which is sad, but yeah, I’m in, I’m in a very secure environment where we don’t even have the internet on our editing systems, and so it becomes I don’t think I can use cello, which is very unfortunate and very sad for me, because just having the checklist, I mean, I may use it for deliverables checklists, just because that doesn’t give away anything, so I think you could probably still get away with doing deliverables and stuff like that, but I, I would not recommend doing a structure map or anything like that if you’re in a very highly secure environment, but if you’re allowed, but like Zack said, if you’re allowed Google Drive, if you’re allowed Dropbox, that I mean, especially if you’re allowed Google Drive, I think that Trello is just as secure as those sorts of programs, so that I don’t think is a problem, if you can, if you can put all of your scripts and stuff on something that’s in the cloud, then you can put your stuff on Trello, but if you’re in a really secure environment, like I am now, I wouldn’t put any structure maps, I wouldn’t put any scripts, I wouldn’t put anything, anything that pertains to story or anything like that on Trello, but you can put, I think, well, I’m not going to say you can, I say I would get approval and make sure, but I don’t see how it would be a problem to put like a deliverables checklist on Trello or stuff like that, sort of the general admin type of stuff. So, yeah, I think I think that that could be kosher, but yeah, nothing to do with what the show is. So, there’s my two cents on security, but get approval for it. If you’re really concerned and you want to get approval, you don’t want to get in trouble or lose your job or anything like that. So, if it’s something that’s a big concern to you, I would, I would talk to your producer about it and see what they think.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so it’s a very small subset of people that won’t be able to, like, on both Empire and the Netflix show that we were on, and the Paramount show, like we were still under NDA, like these were high-profile, high-security shows, but we had documents on Google Drive, we had email, and we had internet on our computer, so nobody questions whether or not we could use Trello. So just think about it that way. If, if you have to enter a 14 digit security code to get into your office, and you like exactly, and you have to like take a lie detector test every single morning on the way to work, you probably can’t use Trello, but for the 99% of us that are in post workflows where that’s not a concern, Trello is completely secure and it’s not an issue. So I want to go ahead, just do one last quick closer question, then we’ll wrap this up. The last question is actually submitted by Mike Nichols, once again, I think he submitted at least 50% of my questions. This

Natalie Boschan: Is the big one.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is the really, really big one. And he says, Do you think the top is going to quit spinning at the end of inception? And I throw a question back to you, Mike, which is, How do you know the top is spinning at

Natalie Boschan: All? Oh,

Zack Arnold: So that having. Been said I’m gonna let let Mike stew on that one for a while, but this is always has been a pleasure having you back on the show, and talking about Trello, and yes, it is indeed going to be very sad knowing that you’re going to work on Monday and working with another editor, and I’m just gonna be sitting at home, so it’s I’m very, I’m very upset about that, but

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, but I love the editor I’m working with, so

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I’m very excited for you, and God, I wish that I could tell people what you were involved with right now, because it’s really, really, really cool, but we can’t talk about it. So, all right, well, that having been said, I’m gonna let you go back to your day, but I appreciate the time, and you and I will, we’ll connect very, very soon, I’m sure.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, for sure. Awesome.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were prepared by Jakin Rintelman, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.

The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.